The Grey Afternoon Between Two Empires

Fog on the Navigli

There are years that arrive like guests and years that arrive like weather, and 1975 came down on Milan the way November comes down on the Navigli: not as an event but as a condition, a grey that settled into the lungs of the city and would not be coughed out. Italy called them the years of lead, and the metal was well chosen — lead in the air of the piazzas, lead in the belly of an economy still digesting the oil shock and the recession that trailed it, lead in the boots of a footballing republic that kept playing, kept quarrelling, kept eating, because that is what Italy does when history leans on the doorbell. And in the middle of it, neither champion nor corpse, stood Milan: a club that had conquered Europe within living memory and now could not conquer its own boardroom.

You must understand what Milan were in 1975, because that understanding seasons everything that follows the way soffritto seasons a risotto. They were drifters — fifth in the spring, far adrift of Juventus, who counted their sixteenth scudetto while Torino's Paolo Pulici led the league's marksmen with eighteen goals and prepared, though nobody in Milan cared to hear it, the granata spring that was coming. The empire of Rocco and Rivera was memory; whatever empire came next was not yet even rumour. Between two golden ages there is always a long grey afternoon, and this chapter is the story of one — told, I promise, with affection, for the grey afternoons are where a club discovers which of its lovers are faithful.

The War Upstairs

Every unhappy club is unhappy in the boardroom first. The president was Albino Buticchi, and his war was with the one man in Milan a president cannot afford to fight: Gianni Rivera — captain, conscience, last prince of the club's great decade. The spark came from newsprint, a headline in the Corriere della Sera pairing the names Rivera and Sala, floating a swap that would have sent the golden boy to Turin and brought Torino's Claudio Sala the other way; and from that single line of type grew a feud of operatic proportions. Rivera stayed away from training. Milan left Rivera out. And the armband — that scrap of cloth which in Italy weighs more than most crowns — passed to Romeo Benetti, the blacksmith of the midfield, who captained the side through the closing matches of the Coppa Italia, final included, and on into the new season.

But Rivera, as his opponents forever forgot until it was too late, did not play chess only on grass. Before the year was out he had bought Buticchi's majority shareholding — the captain purchasing the club that had benched him, a plot twist a novelist would have rejected as too tidy — and installed Bruno Pardi in the president's chair. The ledgers quarrel over the date, as ledgers of that era do: one account places Pardi's arrival as early as the spring, in the wake of the share deal itself, another in the days just before Christmas. I give you the quarrel rather than a false certainty, and note only the essential truth beneath it: by the time Milan sat down to their panettone, the Buticchi era was finished, and the man who had ended it wore, or had worn, the number ten.

Fifth, With Honour and Without

The league season that closed in May — begun on the sixth of October 1974, ended on the eighteenth of May 1975 — deserves neither hymn nor requiem, and I shall compose neither. Fifth place, thirty-six points: twelve won, twelve drawn, six lost, thirty-seven scored, twenty-two conceded. Read those numbers as you would read a menu and you taste the dish at once — a defence of genuine Lombard prudence, an attack that dined on scraps, and twelve draws, twelve, like twelve risottos taken off the flame a minute early, each one nearly a meal. Teams that draw a dozen times in thirty matches are not bad teams; they are teams that lack a reason, and Milan's reason was upstairs, quarrelling with itself.

And yet the season refused to end entirely in grey. Milan had built themselves a cup run, and cup runs are the consolation literature of unhappy leagues. The road ended in Rome, at the end of June, under a heat no Milanese entirely trusts.

Rome, the Twenty-Eighth of June

The final: Stadio Olimpico, the twenty-eighth of June 1975, Alberto Michelotti with the whistle. Fiorentina three, Milan two, and the manner of it crueller than the arithmetic. Casarsa opened from the penalty spot on fourteen minutes; Bigon answered on twenty, and the match was level and honest. Guerini restored the violet lead on fifty-four; Chiarugi hauled Milan level again on sixty-five; and then, two minutes later, with Milan's second equaliser still warm on the scoreboard, the substitute Paolo Rosi struck the goal that gave Fiorentina their fourth Coppa Italia and gave Milan a long train home.

Twice behind, twice level, and beaten within a hundred and twenty seconds of their second resurrection — there is the whole year distilled into a single evening, if you want it neat. Benetti wore the armband that night; Rivera's shadow wore everything else. A club that finds the character to equalise twice in a final and cannot find the concentration to hold the line for two minutes afterwards is not a club short of players; it is a club short of peace. The peace, as we have seen, was being negotiated in offices, and offices keep slower clocks than referees.

An Italy of Eleven Italians

Consider the squad, because in 1975 the squad itself was a statement. Karl-Heinz Schnellinger had gone after nine seasons of Teutonic granite, and with his going Milan fielded an all-Italian squad for the first time since 1944-45 — a sentence that says as much about a national football closed in on itself like a courtyard house as any editorial of the period. Into the courtyard had come Enrico Albertosi from Cagliari to keep the goal, Aldo Bet from Verona and Luciano Zecchini from Torino to guard it, and, from Varese, a centre-forward named Egidio Calloni, of whom more presently. The following summer added Nevio Scala from Inter, Michele De Nadai from Lecco and Francesco Vincenzi from Monza: honest stock, provincial stock, the kind of shopping a club does when its money and its mind are elsewhere.

Albertosi was ever-present — thirty league appearances of a possible thirty, the one fixed point in a turning year — and Calloni, the honest woodcutter of the attack, led the scoring in both seasons the calendar touched: eleven league goals in 1974-75 and seventeen in all competitions, thirteen and nineteen the year after. I call him the woodcutter with tenderness, not scorn. He chopped, he hauled, he missed what he missed and he scored what he scored, and in a house without a settled prince it was the woodcutter's wages that kept the table laid. Every era gets the centre-forward it deserves; the grey afternoon got Calloni, and it could have done considerably worse.

The Night of the Postmen

Europe, meanwhile, offered the UEFA Cup, and the UEFA Cup offered first a lesson in professionalism and then a lesson in humility. Everton were dispatched with an accountant's economy — goalless at Goodison Park on the seventeenth of September, one-nil at San Siro on the first of October — and the draw then produced, from the flat green middle of Ireland, a name the Milanese had to look up on a map: Athlone Town, of the League of Ireland, semi-professionals, a team — as the news bulletins would have it — of postmen, butchers and bakers.

What happened at St Mel's Park on the twenty-second of October 1975 is the beating heart of Milan's year precisely because Milan did not lose it. The little ground had been hastily enlarged for the occasion, and into it pressed a crowd the chronicles count variously at nine thousand or above ten thousand — when a miracle is in the room, nobody counts soberly. Amby Fogarty, once an international for the Republic of Ireland, had prepared his part-timers to play rather than to kneel, and around the half-hour the impossible knocked: a penalty to Athlone. John Minnock placed the ball and looked up at Enrico Albertosi, Italy's World Cup goalkeeper, across twelve yards of Irish October. The kick was tame; Albertosi went down to his right and held it; and the goalless draw that followed was worth more to Athlone than most victories are worth to anyone.

The word of it, as the Athlone men delighted in recalling for decades — Eugene Davis among them — travelled all the way to the BBC's news bulletins: in Ireland, the world was told, a team of tradesmen had held the mighty Milan. It took the San Siro itself, a fortnight later, to close the argument, and even there, on the fifth of November, Athlone kept the great bowl scoreless until the sixty-third minute, when Vincenzi at last broke through and Benetti added a free-kick and a late penalty for the three-nil that settled the tie. Three-nil on aggregate, says the record book, and shrugs, and moves on. But history is not the record book. For a Milan stranded between the glories of Rocco and a dawn still hidden below the horizon, Athlone was a mirror, and the reflection carried a warning: fame is a currency, and Milan were spending reserves they were no longer earning.

Trapattoni's First Winter

By then the bench had changed. Gustavo Giagnoni, who had steered the fifth-place season and begun the new one, paid for a poor start with his post, and on the second of October 1975 the club turned to a man already on the staff: Giovanni Trapattoni, entrusted with the team through to the following May, with old Nereo Rocco returning above him as technical director. Nobody at the time called it an epoch. It was housekeeping, a promotion from within, the cheapest repair available to a distracted board. It was also, as the decades would reveal with their usual slow irony, the beginning in earnest of one of the great coaching careers — the caretaker of the spring of 1974 given, at last, a season of his own — but that is another volume, and 1975 knew nothing of it. What 1975 knew was that the team began, gently, to hold its shape.

The autumn reads like a convalescence chart. Goalless at Perugia on the fifth of October; a Bigon goal to beat Sampdoria on the twelfth; a Vincenzi equaliser at Bologna on the nineteenth; then, on the second of November, a four-nil dismantling of Ascoli that reminded San Siro what appetite looked like. There were relapses — Juventus took their visit on the sixteenth of November by a goal to nil, Napoli won at the end of the month, Torino came to San Siro in mid-December and left two-one winners — but there were also the two results by which a Milanese winter is always judged: on the seventh of December the derby, Milan two, Inter one, the Madonnina's blessing bestowed for once upon the red half of her city; and on the twenty-first a one-nil at Fiorentina, a small cold dish of revenge for Rome, served in time for Christmas.

Europe kept pace with the league's slow mending. Spartak Moscow were taken apart four-nil at San Siro on the twenty-sixth of November, and though the return — played, by one of the competition's geographical jokes, down in Sochi — was lost two-nil in December, Milan went through four-two on aggregate, towards a quarter-final that spring would hand to Bruges, two-nil away and two-one at home. The league season Trapattoni inherited in October would finish third, thirty-eight points from fifteen wins, eight draws and seven defeats, with a ticket back into the UEFA Cup. Not a resurrection; a pulse. After the year Milan had lived through, a pulse was news.

The Verdict

So what was 1975? It was the year Milan learned that a club can be owned, captained and coached and still not led; the year the armband passed from the prince to the blacksmith while the prince quietly bought the castle; the year the woodcutter's honest goals kept the table set; the year Italy's World Cup goalkeeper needed one save, in an Irish market town, to spare the club a humiliation that would have outlived everyone present. Juventus had the scudetto, Fiorentina had the cup, Torino had the league's sharpest striker and, soon enough, more than that; Milan had fog, and a war upstairs, and a young coach beginning by sweeping the stairs.

And yet I ask the reader — including the reader in Adelaide, half a world and half a century away, for whom these grey seasons are the ancestral rooms of the family house — not to skip this chapter on the way to the brighter ones. A club is not made in its triumphs; triumphs are merely the days the accounts are published. A club is made in years like this, when the fog is general and the board is at war and fifth place must be carried home like shopping in the rain — and still, on a December Sunday, San Siro fills, and Inter are beaten two-one, and an old man returns as technical director to stand behind a young one, and somewhere in the Irish midlands a town will talk about you for the rest of its life. The verdict on 1975 is the verdict on all purgatories: nothing was won, and nothing essential was lost. Milan were keeping the flame at pilot-light. It would burn low for some years yet — but the kitchen, friends, was never cold.